Judge dismisses Dotcom conspiracy theories

Mega founder Kim Dotcom been denied access to evidence against him to be used in his upcoming extradition hearing.

Dotcom had applied for documents held by the Security Intelligence Service (SIS), Immigration New Zealand, police, Customs, Corrections and the Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB), but a District Court decision released today has dismissed the application. …

In declining the other documents, Judge Dawson said the evidence and submissions “fell well short” of what was needed to consider granting the applications.

He also said there was “no reasonable basis” for granting the application for the documents.

“It bears all the hallmarks of a fishing expedition that would involve an extensive amount of time and resources to satisfy with a very low likelihood of it producing evidence relevant to the extradition hearing.”

It is worth quoting the judgement:

[47] To date, there is no evidence of any nexus between the Prime Minister’s meeting with the CEO of Warner Bros with Mr Dotcom’s residency applications other than the coincidence of the times of events pointed to by him. There is also an alternate explanation that could be advanced. Mr Dotcom had become impatient over what he perceived as delays with his residency application and informed INZ that his application could be withdrawn if it was not granted by 1 November 2010. The residency application was granted on 30 October 2010. It is feasible that INZ granted the residency application of a high net-worth person who was pressuring them for a decision.

[48]The respondents need to prove some nexus between Mr Dotcom being granted residency and his claim of untoward political pressure being placed upon immigration officials to grant his residency other than hypothesised coincidence. In addition, they would need to show links between the INZ, NZSIS, the Prime Minister, the CEO of Warner Bros and the Applicant [the US government, my brackets] which showed the Applicant’s involvement in the actions of the New Zealand agencies. They would then need to show some illegal action by the Applicant indicating there was an abuse of process that would lead this court to provide some sanction against the Applicant in this case. To date they have not done so. Nor has it been shown that INZ and the NZSIS were acting as agencies for the Applicant at this time.”

[49] The Respondents’ applications are based upon Mr Dotcom’s theory which is based upon evidence which has a plausible alternative explanation. They lack any “air of reality” as they rely upon a perceived coincidence. These applications are in the nature of a fishing expedition, made in the hope of flushing out evidence which may be useful to the Respondents. Even if it was successful it is highly unlikely that it would be evidence that might assist the Respondents to counter any of the Applicants’ evidence in the ROC. If evidence of improper political involvement was found, it would not impact upon the extradition hearing. It may or may not impact upon other court proceedings, but it is not the role of this court to grant discovery orders that may or may not be relevant to other proccedings.

The Judge must have missed seeing the Campbell Live programme!

This is a major setback to Dotcom. His defence seems to be based on this conspiracy theory, and the court has said it has no air of reality. That’s strong language.

The extradition date is set for 7 July but one of the parties (I suspect Dotcom) has asked for a deferral – maybe hoping for a delay until Russel Norman is Minister of Justice!

goldnkiwi

Justice may be blind, sometimes it is wrong, laws can be stupid but I do not think Justice is. As for natural justice the only one I see as trying to pervert NZ laws and the courts to their own ends is the ego commonly known as Kim Dotcom.

Bullshit Red. To have him extradited, all the Americans have to do is prove that they have a prima facie case against him. Dotcom’s lawyers have fought every peripheral aspect of the case, and the only victory so far is the Court of Appeal’s decision that the FBI was wrong to take electronic evidence back to the USA. Even on that decision, the warrants that underpinned the first raid were ruled to be legal.

Dotcom is not being “fitted up by Govt.” as you allege; he fitted himself up by getting too greedy with his get-rich-quick scheme that depended on having a small army of geeks stealing other people’s creative content, and a larger army of people who were prepared to pay a subscription to access the illegal content, thus depriving the people who made it of income.

I’m surprised that someone who is forever banging on about the National Party not sticking to its founding principles is so supportive of a rip-off merchant and wide boy like Dotcom. Theft of other people’s ideas and work is not free enterprise; it’s actually a form of socialism.

Peter

Crumble Live will be preparing some doom-laden music to play underneath a series of John Key diary entries as we speak. Ah, what the hell – just use this weeks episode and cut in a lot of loveable “isn’t he a bit of a character” KDC pics.

As much as the Key supporters on this blog will never admit it, this whole thing is down to John Key, because he changed the focus of the GCSB to please Obama who was in turn anxious to ensure he kept getting dollars from his Hollywood donors.

Key should have refused the US requests, said Obama’s problems were Obama’s problems, and said he preferred to keep the GCSB focus where it belonged, on threats to NZ’s security.

The GCSB was never intended to be part of file sharing prosecutions/ investigations, and this whole mess only arose because John Key changed its job description to please Obama.

goldnkiwi

Justice is subjective, outcomes perceived from the stance of the winner or loser. The ‘ego’ has landed encapsulates this person from my perspective. While there is money, lawyers will find cause.

What do they say? Never admit guilt, deny, deny, deny.

Personally as we are sovereign, politically we can do what we damn well like and the less Dotcom likes it the better.

I assume some of the children are NZ citizens, that will be a pleading also. I do not believe NZ was chanced upon. How would Dotcom fare in another jurisdiction? He has so many options and no real ties to NZ since we are hopefully not to his liking and not as much of a walkover as he thought.

The theory that it was all about Hollywood money seems reasonable, but it doesn’t take into account the historical security arrangement between US or the ability of surveillance to used for commercial or political purposes, eg insider trading or blackmail.

Sir Cullen's Sidekick

Anybody remember the Irish guy Danny Butler and the drama Paul Holmes enacted on TV putting pressure on the then immigration minister Max Bradford to keep him here?

Wait for the gnome Campbell to create controversy, drama, spread rumours about the government when the time nears for Fatcon’s extradition to USA….. He will run SMS polls, go around the country preaching how bad John Key is…. oh boy!

goldnkiwi

questions

Keeping Stock says:Dotcom is not being “fitted up by Govt.” as you allege; he fitted himself up by getting too greedy with his get-rich-quick scheme that depended on having a small army of geeks stealing other people’s creative content, and a larger army of people who were prepared to pay a subscription to access the illegal content, thus depriving the people who made it of income.\

Manolo

slijmbal

“Mega founder Kim Dotcom been denied access to evidence against him to be used in his upcoming extradition hearing”

is actually completely contradicted by the Judge’s statement that “……with a very low likelihood of it producing evidence relevant to the extradition hearing.”

In effect, according to the Judge, he is not being denied access to evidence against him – as it relates to the extradition hearing .

I’m assuming that the Judge is correct in law, of course, as extraditions work under specific rules of what is applicable – you don’t get to try the case in NZ. It might not seem fair to Red but it’s the application of the law and not to be played with by the government and rightly so.

goldnkiwi

mara

My young daughter would not steal a loaf of bread from a supermarket but can see nothing wrong with stealing intellectual property online. I struggle with that and can see that I am on the losers side. That is because I am old enough to see out the days when a handshake was as good as a bond and there was an unspoken agreement that you do not cannibalise your own family.

fernglas

the main problem Dotcom has is one he shares with all of us on this blog, and that is that he thinks people actually give a fuck about what is debated on the internet. They don’t, and he may be a source of amusement but he has no real credibility; the sort of credibility that translates to votes. To vote, you have to get off your arse and walk to a polling station, not press a button on your keyboard. Dotcom is a lovely sideshow but surely this country can see what really matters?

Pongo

Rich Prick

goldnkiwi

Personally I am glad backbone is being shown, now the truth is emerging, bluff and bluster and money should only get one so far. Along with the stitch droppers I hope Banks’s own supporters can find a seat. Not very large public galleries from what I have seen of the Auckland High Court.

igm

The fat criminal slug really starting to be exposed for what he is, hopefully Hone will wake up before it is too late. He knows he is guilty as sin of charges levelled against him in US and he will stoop as low as a Labour/Green to orchestrate the blocking of his extradition order. Get the mongrel out of our country now . . . he is as bad, if not worse, than terrorist Zaoui. Wonder if the evil Manning will jump on his bandwagon!

igm

Scott1

In this case I imagine that the process will, in its glacially slow way, slowly ensure that Dotcom is extradited. In the end think if we have an issue with that it should be with extradition law as opposed to with what actually happens because it does appear that under current law and evidence Dotcom should / will be extradited eventually.

tvb

Kim Dotcom found a way of taking the creative content of others without payment and allowing subscribers to his service to access it for a small fee that was presumably smaller than the fee the content producers would charge for it themselves. It is no coincidence KDC and the Mana Party are forming a political alliance. They both believe in taking other people’s property without compensation.

G152

Nostalgia-NZ

The Judge could have taken the completely opposite view and ordered the release of the documents thereby putting all ‘grounds’ for speculation aside. The ‘fishing expedition’ barrier is used too often, and always it seems to block release of documents which in themselves may invariably be seen as simply a ‘fishing expedition.’ This ‘protection’ of saving civil servants the ‘job’ of having to compile documents for release is a have.

stephieboy

I wonder if it would be helpful if the media simply reverted to calling him by his real name, Kim Schmitz.?A repeated use of his real name might get some real media investigative skills working especially about his activities back in the home country.

Nostalgia-NZ

Another hearing and still none the wiser as to why it took AOS members backed up be helicopters and ‘advisors’ from the FBI to arrest an apparently physically harmless individual while his pregnant wife was ordered to lie on the ground. Oh, that’s right he played computer games and liked pies and he might have run to the fridge and finished off all the steak’n and cheeses.

OneTrack

nostalgia – “Another hearing and still none the wiser as to why it took AOS members backed up be helicopters ”

Never mind, when the green-labour nirvana gets in, we will have a witch hunt to name, shame and tar and feather the public servant(s) in the police hierarchy who decided that the raid was the appropriate action to take. They really should have used their 20:20 hindsight like everybody else is.

Dotcom was born Kim Schmitz in Kiel (Germany). He used an online alias of Kimble, renamed himself Kim Jim Tim Vestor when he moved to Asia after being investigated in Germany for insider trading, and later (2005) changed his name to Kim Dotcom.

All_on_Red

Nostalgia
Didn’t the Police find firearms on the property?
I don’t know if you have ever seen the house, but it’s surrounded by high walls and has a big fuck off gate, so is pretty impregnable. I guess the Helicopter made it easier to get past the gate, and let’s face it, plenty of room for it to land.
Personally I’d rather the Police went in from a position of strength as opposed to going in undermanned and one of them dying.

wikiriwhis business

“That is unfair.

And it will backfire.

Makes it look as if Dotcom is being fitted up by Govt.

Just as he has always claimed.”

I certainly hope it will backfire but that would prove serious negligence and full prejudice against Dotcom which John Key has publicly displayed. The courts are following suit. Vested international evidence which is no theory but certainly conspiratal in any man’s language

wikiriwhis business

The National Party’s most vocal blogger Cameron Slater is to blame for much of the general vituperation towards Kim Dotcom. Among National supporters, the hatred of KDC is completely over the top.

I certainly don’t give a damn about the Nats. I do know that spying agencies set up to keep NZ secure from external threats should never have been diverted to file sharing issues.

I do know that KDC was illegally spied upon.

I do know that officials had to resign of a result of these illegal activities.

I do know that the raid on KDC’s private residence by the Armed Offenders Squad was a disgraceful and disgusting travesty of judicial procedure.

I suspect that this was all done with John Key’s approval because I have witnessed his sickening fawning over the fraud & criminal Barack Obama, and when a 70 man team with 2 helicopters and assisted by the OAS raids a NZ citizen’s house the PM has to know about it. So that he didn’t stop it means he condoned it.

I know that the criminal Obama badly needed action on file sharing to appease his big spending Hollywood donors, who when they make movies and TV series, stack them full of Progressive propaganda favourable to the Democrats.

So I’m not affected by Slater’s hate mongering. Just looking at it objectively, its plain KDC’s rights have been trampled and whether he is guilty or not this whole thing is a sickening travesty of legal process.

However the growing lynch mob mentality towards KDC is even more sickening. Surprising to me really. Even when I know NZ is hopelessly in the grip of the one party state mindset, this kind of manipulation of public opinion and the widespread unthinking persecution it results in is reminiscent of completely fascist states with terrible histories.

Kim Dotcom found a way of taking the creative content of others without payment and allowing subscribers to his service to access it for a small fee that was presumably smaller than the fee the content producers would charge for it themselves. It is no coincidence KDC and the Mana Party are forming a political alliance. They both believe in taking other people’s property without compensation.

An essential quality of property is exclusive possession. It’s not accurate to speak of taking other people’s property in the context of copying something.

stephieboy

UT, thus for artists like Bic Runga or say Lorde i do not have ” exclusive possession” to any songs they may of composed , performed and published.?
Copy right laws therfore exist for the whim of those who think they can dine out for free on other’s hard work and efforts.?

goldnkiwi

Is there a computer or online game called ‘conspiracy’, if not clearly there is an opening. It would seem that it is a game that people currently are thought to play in secrecy ;). Perhaps call it ‘Kimspiracy’.

goldnkiwi

In the context of copying, universities pay to cite or use other peoples work, radio stations pay to play others work, due I guess to there being a commercial aspect/purpose to the ‘copying’. Everything should be user pays. Just because the internet has made access more anonymous and easy, it should not mean that the maxim should not apply. Supply and demand. Just because there is a demand, does that mean that someone should be an illegal enabler?

I doubt that the enabler would do so without being paid, so why shouldn’t everyone involved get to clip the ticket, especially the owner of the intellectual property?

goldnkiwi

Not when the user takes nothing from the creator of the the work that he copied. It’s different when money changes hands because it is taking a revenue opportunity from the author/creator, or in cases of plagiarism because the of lost recognition for a creative work.

goldnkiwi

How are they not taking something that they have no right to. The whole reason there are rights of creation(intellectual property, patents etc) is that they are worthy of protection. Those rights are finite not infinite. Let them eat cake ;).

Nostalgia-NZ

‘Nostalgia
Didn’t the Police find firearms on the property?
I don’t know if you have ever seen the house, but it’s surrounded by high walls and has a big fuck off gate, so is pretty impregnable. I guess the Helicopter made it easier to get past the gate, and let’s face it, plenty of room for it to land.
Personally I’d rather the Police went in from a position of strength as opposed to going in undermanned and one of them dying’

Yes I have seen the house. Whilst it is a fortress in many respects it would also be difficult to escape from. However, I’m sure the Auckland police were capable of arresting him any time, and at their own choice – off the property. The arrest had all the elements of a Hollywood plot, we may yet find out that the team of nannies were in fact highly trained ninjas.

goldnkiwi

I guess for those that think others have no right to life, evidenced by them taking it, the taking of a bit of intellectual property is a no brainer (pun intended) I guess the ‘state’ believed the ‘act’ and ‘ego’ that Dotcom portrayed.

Why did Dotcom need body guards again? My answer would be ego but then we now all have the benefit of hindsight. He believes his own hype, didn’t he want others to? Guess he got his wish re name recognition eh and being talked about, we certainly will not forget that he graced our shores.

Funny thing about German/Germany and being taught the language in school relatively soon after the war (70’s), what did our grandfathers think of that inclusion in the school curriculum, lest we forget!!!